The Best Foreign Fiction & Non-Fiction We Published in June 2018

Emily Charlton does not do the suburbs. A successful stylist and image consultant to Hollywood stars, she cut her teeth as an assistant to legendary fashion editor Miranda Priestly in New York. But with Snapchatting millennials stealing her clients, Emily needs to get back in the game – and fast.

She holes up at the home of her oldest friend Miriam in the upscale suburb of Greenwich. And when Miriam’s friend, model Karolina Hartwell, is publicly dumped by her husband Graham, a senator with presidential ambitions, Emily scents the client of a lifetime.

It’s not just Karolina’s reputation that’s ruined. It’s her family. And Miriam and Emily are determined he won’t get away with it. First, they’ll get Karolina’s son back. Then they’ll help her get her own back. Because the wives are mad as hell . . .

Paperback | 416 pages | INR 399

Sidney Sheldon’s The Silent Widow | Tilly Bagshawe

Sweeping from Mexico City to the dark underbelly of LA, The Silent Widow has all the trademark glamour, suspense and unexpected twists of a classic Sidney Sheldon novel.

A young American au pair, Charlotte Clancy, vanishes without a trace in Mexico City. The case is left cold, but its legacy will be devastating. A decade later, LA is shaken by a spate of violent murders. Psychologist Nikki Roberts is the common link between the victims, her patients at the heart of this treacherous web. When someone makes an attempt on Nikki’s life, it’s clear she is a marked woman. Nikki makes a living out of reading people, drawing out their secrets, but the key to this shocking pattern eludes her. With the police at a dead end, Nikki drafts in Derek Williams, a PI who isn’t afraid to put his hand into the hornet’s nest. Williams was thwarted in the notorious Charlotte Clancy case all those years ago, but what he unearths in LA – and the mention of one name in particular – leaves him cold, and takes him on a dangerous path into the past. A shadowy manipulator has brought his deadly game to the streets of LA. In a crime spanning generations, it seems Nikki Roberts knows all too much – and a ruthless killer knows the price of her silence. In this crooked city, where enemies and friends are one and the same, Nikki must be the master of her own escape . . .

Paperback | 448 pages | INR 399

The Book of M | Peng Shepherd

A vivid, touching and original debut, following the effects of an extraordinary catastrophe on very ordinary people.

In the middle of a market in India, a man’s shadow disappears. As rolling twenty-four-hour news coverage tries to explain the event, more cases are discovered. The phenomenon spreads like a plague as people learn the true cost of their lost part: their memories.

Two years later, Ory and his wife Max have escaped ‘the Forgetting’ by hiding in an abandoned hotel deep in the woods in Virginia. They have settled into their new reality, until Max, too, loses her shadow. Knowing the more she forgets, the more dangerous she will become to the person most precious to her, Max runs away. But Ory refuses to give up what little time they have left before she loses her memory completely, and desperately follows her trail. On their separate journeys, each searches for answers: for Ory, about love, about survival, about hope; and for Max, about a mysterious new force growing in the south that may hold the cure. But neither could have guessed at what you gain when you lose your shadow: the power of magic. A breathtakingly imaginative, timeless story that explores fundamental questions about memory and love—the price of forgetting, the power of connection, and what it means to be human when your world is turned upside down.

The disturbing, untold story of one of the largest financial institutions in the world, Citigroup—one of the ‘too big to fail’ banks—from its founding in 1812 to its role in the 2008 financial crisis, and the many disasters in between.

During the 2008 financial crisis, Citi was presented as the victim of events beyond its control—the larger financial panic, unforeseen economic disruptions, and a perfect storm of credit expansion, private greed, and public incompetence. To save the economy and keep the bank afloat, the government provided huge infusions of cash through multiple bailouts that frustrated and angered the American public. But, as financial experts James Freeman and Vern McKinley reveal, the 2008 crisis was just one of many disasters Citi has experienced since its founding more than two hundred years ago. In Borrowed Time, they reveal Citi’s history of instability and government support. It’s not a story that either Citi or Washington wants told. The scale of the financial panic of 2008 was not, as the media and experts claim, unprecedented. As Borrowed Time shows, disasters have been relatively frequent during the century of government-protected banking—especially at Citi.

Paperback | 384 pages | INR 599

Agatha Oddly: The Secret Key | Lena Jones

Meet thirteen-year-old Agatha Oddly – a bold, determined heroine, and the star of a stylish new detective series. Agatha Oddlow has been a detective for as long as she can remember – she’s just been waiting for her first big case. And nothing gets bigger than saving the City of London from some strange goings-on. With a scholarship to the prestigious St Regis School, a cottage in the middle of Hyde Park, a room full of beloved sleuthing novels, and a secret key that gives her access to a whole hidden side of London, Agatha is perfectly poised to solve the mystery of what’s going on. But just who can she trust when no one is quite who they seem…

Paperback | 320 pages | INR 350

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus | John Gray

The legendary relationships guide that mothers recommend to their daughters, friends give as gifts and brothers steal from their sisters, MEN ARE FROM MARS AND WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS is inarguably the definitive book on having a happy relationship.

‘A treasure’, ‘a bible’ and ‘an heirloom’ are some of the words used to describe the book that has saved countless relationships and improved innumerable others. Now repackaged to relate to a new generation of readers, this phenomenal book continues to carry its legacy of understanding and trust into the world. Since its first publication, over a staggering 15 million copies of MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS have sold globally to single men and women looking for guidance on how to find the perfect partner, married couples seeking to strengthen their bond, and divorcees hoping to fathom where it all went wrong.

Gray’s insights into how to allow your other half to ‘pull away’ like an elastic band, prevent your emotional baggage from polluting your current relationship, and translate the phrases of the opposite sex are as relevant now as when they were first published. With straightforward, honest writing from that precious male perspective, Gray unlocks the secrets hidden in your partner’s words and actions to enable you both to reach true mutual understanding and a lifetime of love. Discover for yourself why thousands believe that MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS should be mandatory reading for everyone.

Paperback | 320 pages | INR 350

Questions I Want to Ask You | Michelle Falkoff

Patrick ‘Pack’ Walsh is happy where he is. He may not have plans for college. He’ll probably never travel the world. He hasn’t even been more than an hour away from his hometown. And he’s fine with that. Then, on his eighteenth birthday, a letter from his past changes everything. As Pack begins a journey to uncover the truth about the parents he thought he knew, the family he didn’t know he had, and the future he never realized he wanted, he begins to have a whole different understanding of his life—and where he wants to go from here. Blending page-turning mystery with a family saga and coming of age, this captivating new novel from the author of Playlist for the Dead and Pushing Perfect will keep readers guessing until the final page.

Hardback | 320 pages | INR 399

Never Lost Again: The Google Mapping Revolution That Sparked New Industries and Augmented Our Reality | Bill Kilday

As enlightening as The Facebook Effect, Elon Musk, and Chaos Monkeys—the compelling, behind-the-scenes story of the creation of one of the most essential applications ever devised, and the rag-tag team that built it and changed how we navigate the world

Never Lost Again chronicles the evolution of mapping technology—the ‘overnight success twenty years in the making’. Bill Kilday takes us behind the scenes of the tech’s development, and introduces to the team that gave us not only Google Maps but Google Earth, and most recently, Pokémon GO.

He takes us back to the beginning to Keyhole—a cash-strapped startup mapping company started by a small-town Texas boy named John Hanke, that nearly folded when the tech bubble burst. While a contract with the CIA kept them afloat, the company’s big break came with the first invasion of Iraq; CNN used their technology to cover the war and made it famous. Then Google came on the scene, buying the company and relaunching the software as Google Maps and Google Earth. Eventually, Hanke’s original company was spun back out of Google, and is now responsible for Pokémon GO and the upcoming Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

Kilday, the marketing director for Keyhole and Google Maps, was there from the earliest days, and offers a personal look behind the scenes at the tech and the minds developing it. But this book isn’t only a look back at the past; it is also a glimpse of what’s to come. Kilday reveals how emerging map-based technologies including virtual reality and driverless cars are going to upend our lives once again.

Never Lost Again shows us how our worldview changed dramatically as a result of vision, imagination, and implementation. It’s a crazy story. And it all started with a really good map.

The book details the latest science on the complex relationship between the digestive system and the brain, and offers a practical plan for harnessing this relationship to improve health physically and mentally.

We have all experienced the connection between our mind and our gut—the decision we made because it ‘felt right’; the butterflies in our stomach before a big meeting; the anxious stomach rumbling when we’re stressed out. While the dialogue between the gut and the brain has been recognized by ancient healing traditions, including Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, Western medicine has failed to appreciate the complexity of how the brain, gut, and more recently, the microbiome—the microorganisms that live inside us—communicate with one another. In The Mind-Gut Connection, Dr Emeran Mayer, Executive Director of the UCLA Center for Neurobiology of Stress, offers a revolutionary look at this developing science, teaching us how to harness the power of the mind-gut connection to take charge of our health.